Matthew Botos

We’re doing a week of agile, scrum, and associated tool training at work this week for our whole team, and it’s really eye opening. As I mentioned before, despite a year’s experience with all of this, I’ve always seen it colored though other’s eyes and modified implementations.

At its core, most of it has nothing to do with software development or manufacturing, but just communication in general. Communication amongst a team, with their customers & users, and with the other stakeholders in a project. It’s a basic element, but one that easily becomes ignored or overly virtualized, losing the most valuable type of communication: face-to-face discussion. A good proof is that people use these methods for running a variety of non-technical projects and they do it with technology as simple as index cards and post-it notes.

Respect - and trust - are other core values. Businesses tends to treat people as resources, and get similarly unimpassioned work in return. Treating people as full members of a team with a stake and say in the project’s outcome has more than doubled productivity and quality for those who are willing to make a leap. And it is quite a leap: let a self-organizing team run their own work, replace a hierarchy of team leads with scrum masters who serve the team by removing impediments to facilitate work, and give the team the power to select and dismiss that person as necessary.

It’s a big cultural change to sell and execute, but given that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”, it offers potential for truly effective increases in productivity, quality, and morale.